For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the ensemble-cast boarding school comedy The Hairy Bird (1998), a.k.a. All I Wanna Do, a.k.a. Strike!
Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry. Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.
To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.
Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.
Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.
It would be ridiculous to claim that the sword & sandal genre is having “a moment” in Hollywood right now, given that two isolated examples do not equal a trend, and the two examples in question—Christopher Nolan’s epic Odyssey adaptation and Mattel’s failed He-Man reboot—are more of a “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” situation than they are brothers in arms. Regardless, spending so much time watching ripped men wield swords against wizards & monsters in theaters this year (over 300 minutes of combined runtime) had me thinking back to the ultimate icon of muscly fantasy cinema: Conan the Barbarian. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s casting as the sword & sandal comic book warrior Conan made for some gorgeous meathead action-fantasy imagery, and much of the original 1982 Conan the Barbarian film plays like high art as a result, despite its thoughtless participation in the lowliest of genre tropes. That mix of high & low makes Conan one of the quintessential examples of its genre, but what’s to be made of its two lesser-seen, lesser-loved sequels? Are they also high-art pop cinema like Nolan’s The Odyssey or are they ironic toss-offs with open disdain for their childish audience like the new Masters of the Universe? The answer, of course, is yes; they’re both.
As hyper-violent & hyper-horny as the original Conan film can be, the audience who most gleefully latched onto it were children in the same age range as its source-material comic book’s demographic. At least, that appears to have been the thinking behind its 1984 sequel Conan the Destroyer, which softens Conan’s sex & violence just barely enough to step down from an “R” rating to “PG” (in the precarious months just before the invention of “PG-13”). Conan is in live-action He-Man mode here, thrusting his giant sword against goofball monsters (like the pro-wrestler goblin played by a rubber-masked André the Giant), and picking up a goofball sidekick to crack wise along the way (Tracey Walter, whose performance splits the vast difference between Rob Schneider & Peter Lorre). Still, blood spews by the gallon from open wounds, and decapitated heads still fly across the screen, so Conan the Destroyer ends up playing like a remarkably gory kiddie feature. The highly sexualized casting of Wilt Chamberlain & Grace Jones as Conan’s companions on a mission to transport a young princess with her virginity intact feels like a winking joke that the movie’s school-age audience is too young to get. What they would get, however, is some insanely age-inappropriate violence, like in the climactic battle where Conan slowly rips the bleeding horn out of a yonic demon’s skull while it screams in agony.
While Conan the Destroyer exposes its school-age audience to adult-level bloodshed, the 1985 Conan spinoff Red Sonja exposes them to adult-level sexuality. Red Sonja technically isn’t a Conan the Barbarian film at all, since it’s adapted from a different property penned by Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and Schwarzenegger is officially credited as playing “Lord Kalidor.” Whatever, he’s Conan; the audience cannot be fooled. The only non-Conan thing about him is that he plays second-fiddle to the titular female lead, the red-haired warrior Sonja. Major kudos to series producer Dino De Laurentiis for managing to find an actress who could match Schwarzenegger’s cartoonishly wooden line deliveries in Brigitte Nielsen; Sonja & Conan make a lovely bonehead couple, especially in scenes where they use violent swordplay as an act of foreplay — teasing their mutual intent to “conquer” each other. The only problem is that there’s now a literal child onscreen jealously watching these foreplay bouts, acting as the audience surrogate and the would-be couple’s pint-sized sidekick. Also, the story starts with Sonja’s violent rape (which scares her off of men until she meets the godlike Conan), then goes on to include footage of a topless belly dancer and jokes about the child companion’s enormous penis. On paper, I’m not sure “misandrist rape-revenge saga” screams “kid-friendly adventure comedy,” but that’s exactly how it plays out, which is probably the reason why Red Sonja is considered the nadir of the series.
Despite their dire reputations, I was mostly amused by Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer. The only major disappointment, really, was that for kiddie version of Conan the Barbarian, they don’t make full use of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s talent for delivering groaner one-liners. There are a couple of jokes in Red Sonja that heroically go for the cheese, such as Arnold’s quip, “Tomorrow, I start my diet,” while crawling through a collapsed cave or “How’s the food around here?” when crashing a party in an enemy’s palace. For the most part, though, the wisecracking is left to the other sidekicks in his traveling parties, and no one comes near matching his comedic chops. There’s no reason why Conan the Destroyerhad to have Conan punching out poor, innocent horses for the audience’s entertainment, but would it have killed them to have Arnold punctuate the gag with a deadpan line reading of “Quite horsin’ around”? Much like in the original Conan the Barbarian, he’s mostly used in the sequels as a visual symbol rather than a genuine acting talent, when he’d soon become one of the funniest comedic actors of his era, ironically or not. Neither of the Conan sequels go fully goofy with it, which leaves them trapped between violent action spectacle and kitschy kiddie fluff — a no man’s land for finding & pleasing an audience.
It’s been three years since Criterion’s towering box set of Shōwa era Godzilla films arrived on my doorstep, and I’ve been madly in love ever since. Anytime I’m unsure what movie to watch, I’ll toss on a Godzilla disc to pass the time, the same way an old Beatles record is always there for me whenever I’m indecisive on what to listen to. It’s been lovely, but all affairs eventually run their course, and I’ve officially run out of new-to-me Godzilla movies to watch in that 15-film set. I recently ran through my last two remaining Godzilla titles in rapid succession—1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan and 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla—and found that the romantic spark was still very much alive. Together, they reminded me of two entirely different reasons why I first fell in love with my giant lizard friend, and why it’s so sad I’ll now only be able to revisit that loving feeling in nostalgic rewatches instead of experiencing the seductive rush of a brand-new romance. Of course, the Criterion box set only accounts for half of Godzilla’s ginormous cinematic footprint, and there’s plenty other movies left out there to discover, but I’m still granting myself a little space here to mourn the end of my relationship with the atomic monster’s original run from the 1950s to the 1970s.
By the time Godzilla faced off against Gigan in the early 1970s, he had already fully transformed from harrowing nuclear fallout metaphor to superhero protector of children everywhere. Much of the back half of Godzilla’s Shōwa era finds the skyscraper kaiju beast mugging for the kids in the cheap seats while performing pro wrestling moves on his fellow rubber-suited monsters. In the case of Godzilla vs. Gigan, that means facing off against an especially goofy looking combatant: a cycloptic mechachicken with a whirring buzzsaw in its belly, the creature-design equivalent of when Homer Simpson designed his ideal car. There’s nothing especially novel about the film’s plot, which is yet another alien-invasion story among many in the set, with recycled footage from previous monster attacks and recycled grumblings about how pollution has turned Earth into “a toxic world, a radioactive wasteland.” Still, though, the latter kiddie-fluff Godzilla pics can often surprise you with a novelty in style, in this case a comic book-inspired sensibility that makes the formula feel fresh again. The monster attacks are centered around an amusement park that features a Godzilla-shaped observation tower, and the alien invasion plot (involving cockroach humanoids from another planet) is uncovered by a manga artist who exclusively pitches kid-friendly monster designs like “The Homework Monster” and “The Strict Mom Monster”. That’s not to say that the kaiju action can’t get brutally violent; the climactic fight between Godzilla & Gigan is staged in an exploding oil refinery field and feels like a vision of Hell, leaving Godzilla visibly bleeding onscreen for the first time in the franchise. It’s just that the pronounced comic book sensibility leads to its biggest surprises in terms of novelty. When Godzilla starts chatting to his giant pet armadillo Anguirus in comic-panel speech bubbles, it feels like there are still endless possibilities for what this series can do, despite this entry relying so heavily on pre-existing images the audience has already seen before.
As much fun as the alien cockroaches and comic book speech bubbles of Godzilla vs. Gigan can be, I’m glad that the series toned down its kid-friendly hijinks for its final entry (before the monster’s return in the 80-90s Heisei era), Terror vs. Mechagodzilla. Original Godzilla director Ishirō Honda returned to conclude the Shōwa era on a serious note, keeping all of the space alien invaders and remote-controlled kaiju puppets that had crept into the go-to formula over the years but deciding to play them straight instead of goofy. The opening credits play out over a “Previously on . . .” recap of Godzilla’s first tussle with his “space-titanium” doppelganger Mechagodzilla, then the humans-on-the-ground plot introduces a new combatant to the ring in the underwater dinosaur creature Titanosaurus. Earth is once again characterized as a “polluted & chaotic” nuclear wasteland primed for takeover from mad scientists & alien invaders, but those stock villains’ lives are given more room to develop dramatic tension in this go-round. When the human hero holds the mad scientist’s robot daughter’s dying body in his arms and declares, “You may be a cyborg, but I still love you,” the emotions of the moment actually mean something, against all odds. Ishirō Honda seemed stubbornly determined to reclaim the Godzilla series as more than just kiddie stuff here, aging up the onscreen action with more Godzilla blood in the kaiju battles and cyborg nudity in the sci-fi machinations of the humans-on-the-ground subplot. He even manages to make the recycling of previous Godzilla films’ footage surprisingly elegant, playing highlights from previous monster attacks back in a 4-way splitscreen layout. Honda’s sincerity continually made for Godzilla’s most compelling non-kaiju drama in the monster’s original run, to the point where you forget he also directed a couple of the monster’s silliest, flimsiest outings (namely King Kong vs. Godzilla and All Monsters Attack). The Shōwa era started with Honda’s national heartbreaker Godzilla (1954), and it ended with the director reasserting that the increasingly goofy series still has a beating heart at its core.
Godzilla vs. Gigan was stunt actor Haruo Nakajima’s twelfth & final outing playing Godzilla onscreen, and Terror of Mechagodzilla was Ishirō Honda’s ninth & final Godzilla film as director. Together, they rounded out my personal years-long romance with the 8-disc, 15-film Criterion box set, which only helped underline the finality of Nakajima & Honda’s contributions to the series. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with classic, first-run Godzilla, to the point where I’m questioning whether I was ever properly critical or analytical about any individual entries in the series. When a Godzilla movie isn’t especially great, I’m still always grateful to spend more time with my good friend Godzilla, even having written lengthy apologia about his off-brand American outings. So, when you catch me saying glowing things about Adam Wingard’s King Kong crossovers, Criterion’s new restoration of Godzilla vs. Biollante, or the upcoming Reiwa era update Godzilla Minus Zero, please know that I am grading on a curve because I have nothing but love for Godzilla in my heart. Still, I feel compelled to recap my time spent with the Shōwa era box set by ranking the included films and linking to our reviews across a half-decade of website posts, despite the fact that I love them all and I’m sad to realize that our time together is over.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the encyclopedic Black culture mixtape BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2026).
00:00 Welcome 02:35 Supergirl (2026) 14:14 Roommates (1982) 18:45 Touch Me (2026) 33:05 BloodSisters (1995) 37:12 War and Peace (1965-1967) 1:02:22 Shōwa era Godzilla (1954–1975) 1:11:33 Vortex (2022) 1:21:51 Family Portraits – A Trilogy of America (2003)
1:27:30 BLKNWS – Terms & Conditions (2026) 2:04:50 2026 so far
Prince was a lot of things: a genius, a control freak, a madman, a pervert, an enigmatic visionary. Based on those descriptors, you might assume he was also a great filmmaker, but it’s difficult to make a convincing case. Having already mastered the medium of pop music by the mid 1980s (an indisputable fact by the time he produced the album 1999), Prince was determined to get into pictures, threatening to drop his then-manager Robert Cavallo if he couldn’t land a starring role in a big-time Hollywood movie. That’s how 1984’s Purple Rain came to be, and that’s how Prince’s big-screen career is mostly widely and most fondly remembered. Purple Rain was a huge hit, mythologizing the broad bullet points of the Minneapolis musician’s life story in what’s essentially a feature-length music video about the vicious cycle of domestic abuse. It’s the closest Prince ever got to making a normal, functional movie and it’s still an MTV-addled brainscrambler, repurposing the relentless quick-edit montages of Adrian Lynne’s Flashdance to illustrate & promote its eponymous album by Prince & The Revolution. Unwilling to cede any creative control of his music or image, Prince was heavily involved in the writing of the screenplay and the sounds of his onscreen avatar The Kid’s rival bands, most notably Morris Day and the Time. As a result, everyone in the film dresses & sounds exactly like Prince, while he saves the best tunes for himself and the fictional crowds reject him as an underdog anyway, betraying an underlying self-doubt that drove him to be such a controlling perfectionist in the first place. It’s a narratively confused & confusing film as a result, but it’s undeniable as an 80s-era pop artifact, the undisputed pinnacle of Prince cinema. Then, things got really strange, inscrutibly so.
After the commercial success of Purple Rain, Warner Bros issued a blank check for Prince to produce whatever he wanted for a follow-up, which resulted in the 1986 headscratcher Under the Cherry Moon. Recently restored & re-released for its 40th Anniversary, Under the Cherry Moon is a Merchant Ivory-themed music video set in an alternate universe only Prince could dream up: one exclusively populated by chic babes and flamboyantly gay skirtchasers. Prince stars alongside The Time member Jerome Benton as a pair of Miamian expats who are explained to be brothers living on the French Riviera, but whose onscreen personae are only explainable if they are a closeted gay couple. Regardless, their financial well-being is hinged on their dual schemes to woo local heiresses as boytoy gigolos, a status that’s threatened when Prince accidentally falls in love with a playfully bratty Kristin Scott Thomas. An anachronistic period-piece tragicomedy, Under the Cherry Moon is gorgeous, corny, hip, sexy, and disastrously unfunny in equal measure. Like a lot of failed comedians of their time, Prince & Benton’s approach to humor appears to be entirely based on impersonating Eddie Murphy, to consistently clumsy results. Most failed comedians don’t have access to Prince’s library of all-timer pop tunes, though, and it’s near impossible to hate a film that’s scored by tracks like this one’s hit single, “Kiss.” Prince seemed to be aware that the music video was the visual medium he was best suited for, initially hiring frequent Madonna collaborator Mary Lambert to direct. The same refusal to collaborate that led him to writing & recording all of The Time’s songs himself also led to him taking the project over from Lambert, however, and he ended up with his first official directorial credit — a beautiful, confounding mess.
Prince’s total creative control as a self-designated auteur only tightened from there. The rest of his cinematic output was contained entirely within the sound-stage studio space of Paisley Park, where he made both his very best and his very worst pictures. 1987’s Sign o’ the Times finds Prince in peak form, doing what he does best: music. Ostensibly a live concert film, Sign o’ the Times marks the exact moment Prince retreated to the hermetic studio space of Paisley Park, where he could exert total control over every sound & image captured on record. After shooting some genuine live concert footage in Northern Europe that he found lacking in quality, Prince then reshot a majority of his band’s live show in his home studio, with performers miming their instruments to pre-recorded tracks for optimal sound quality. Once again, the result is more closely aligned with music video filmmaking than a traditional concert doc, so much so that when the footage switches to an actual music video interlude for the Sheena Easton collaboration “U Got the Look,” there’s no discernible break from reality. In this one instance, Prince’s megalomaniacal control over every aspect of production proves to work in his favor, resulting in one of the greatest concert films of all time, regardless of its flimsy definition of what a “concert” even is. Still, some of his control-freak tendencies show in concerning ways. The one standout sequence that doesn’t highlight Prince’s all-powerful awesomeness is a minutes-long drum solo by bandmate Sheila E, who goes full beast mode on a 360° Neil Peart kit. Later, Prince attempts to steal her thunder by having Sheila E indulge in a stage-front dance break so he can show off on that drum kit himself, as if to prove to the audience that he could hit the skins just as well as anyone, if it weren’t for the physical limitation of only having enough arms to play one instrument at a time. In that moment, you get the sense that Prince’s ideal version of playing in “a band” would be taking the stage alongside five or six of his exact clones, but I’m sure he’d also find a way to get overly competitive with parallel versions of himself if he could.
Now self-isolated in the cavernous dungeons of Paisley Park, Prince returned to narrative filmmaking in the early 1990s, kicking off the decade with an instantly ignored & forgotten sequel to Purple Rain. Graffiti Bridge once again stars Prince as The Kid, professionally competing against his funky-unc nemesis Morris Day. Instead of riding his superhero motorcycle around the streets of Minneapolis, however, Prince is now trapped on a skyless sound stage, which is designed & lit in a way that suggests that all four Ninja Turtles are hanging around somewhere nearby, always just barely cropped out of the frame. Plot-wise, Graffiti Bridge makes its audience nostalgic for the relative coherence of Purple Rain, which at least includes narrative details like events and consequences among its more Princely abstract poetics. While Prince is still somehow struggling to convince crowds that his band (now The New Power Generation) is better than The Time, the years-long rivalry is interrupted by the intrusion of an ironically named muse, Aura (the auraless Ingrid Chavez). Aura reads bad poetry to no one in particular under an unconvincing bridge prop leftover from a Muppet Show set. Later, she’s hit by a speeding jeep, and an ambulance scrapes her body off the street, leaving behind her two pop-superstar suitors to call a truce because they’re both sad to see her go. Apparently, she was an angel sacrificed by God to inspire said truce, like a second, sexy coming of Jesus Christ. That non-story just about accounts for the majority of the runtime, give or take the expected music video interludes that mercifully interrupt this supernatural love triangle melodrama (and occasionally feature always-welcome industry luminaries George Clinton & Mavis Staples). The biggest creative leap Graffiti Bridge makes in Prince Cinema is allowing its characters to break into song in full movie-musical fantasy sequences, instead of restricting the song & dance numbers to diegetic stage acts. Otherwise, it finds Prince recoiling into an increasingly private sphere where no one can tell him “No” loud enough to inspire him to refine his ideas in a second draft. Like all first-draft poetry, it sucks.
Prince’s reclusive cinematic output at least got more entertainingly bizarre in 1994’s 3 Chains o’ Gold, even if qualifiers like “good” or “coherent” would be laughably generous. In this case, the muse-du-jour for his Pepe Le Pew romantic antics is short-time spouse Mayte Garcia, whom he met and courted at her mother’s suggestion while she was still a teenager. Alarmingly, 3 Chains o’ Gold includes even younger footage of Mayte as a small child appearing on a segment of the 1970s variety show That’s Incredible!, showing off her prodigal skills as a belly dancer. Prince watches a VHS recording of that performance with a Videodrome-style unseemly fixation and as a result finds himself psychically connected to the now-adult Matye, characterized onscreen as an Egyptian princess fleeing a violent regime change. You can tell 3 Chains o’ Gold was a straight-to-video affair as soon as Princess Matya is introduced during a nude game of lesbian grabass with her bathing handmaidens, intercut with images of her royal father’s nearby assassination. Meanwhile, in Paisley Park, Prince is going through a tough-as-nails hardcore rap phase in a string of music videos for songs with titles like “Sexy MF”. The two destined lovers meet in the US, have a brief soul-shattering affair, then quickly find trouble as the nonstop orgies of Prince’s more routine sex life call back to him like a siren song. Like Sign o’ the Times, 3 Chains o’ Gold finds Prince finally excelling at cinematic language because he’s fully given into the idea that all he’s making are long-form music videos. Only, the songs aren’t as good this time around, and the self-contained self-mythology has gotten so inscrutable to outsiders that it plays like Prince’s version of a Dianetics video. He makes the full transition from pop singer to compounded cult leader in the final minutes of the video, when he literally buries the Prince persona in the ground and resurrects himself as The Symbol — an idol to be worshipped for the endless cosmic power of his sexual charisma. It’s neither good nor coherent, but it is admirably insane.
Those five titles account for Prince’s filmography as listed on Wikipedia, a convenient reference point for audiences outside the Paisley Park cult. Prince’s official filmography gets much more unwieldy when you refer to the bottomless archives of The Prince Vault, which has separate pages listing titles of various TV movies, documentaries, and concert broadcasts Prince produced alongside his more widely distributed works. The most instructive page on the site, for me, is the subcategory of “Unreleased Movies and Documentaries“, which lists a dozen or so projects that were abandoned at various stages of production. It’s in Prince’s unreleased work that I believe he reached his final form as a filmmaker. No longer satisfied with the amount of control he could exert as a writer, director, producer, star, and composer, he eventually discovered a way he could also act as his movies’ sole audience member, so that they could be properly watched & appreciated by the only person who would know how to fully understand them. The stubborn assuredness in vision that Prince demonstrated as an artist allowed him to create some stunning cinematic objects — some great (Purple Rain, Sign o’ the Times), some merely bewildering (Under the Cherry Moon, 3 Chains o’ Gold). The way that same stubbornness got in the way of his ability to delegate & collaborate also cornered him in the lifeless, hermetic world of Graffiti Bridge, though, which I struggle to see as anything other than an elaborate embarrassment. The man was a one-of-a-kind genius, which made for some great art and some frustratingly overworked mediocrities. In either case, I’m surprisingly sad there’s not more of it around to puzzle through.
There’s a new HBO documentary out called Bang My Box that profiles the life and art of late-night TV host Robyn Byrd, who first became famous for hosting a pornographic call-in show on NYC public access channels in the mid 1970s. Byrd’s career spanned multiple decades of bright-eyed & bubbly political provocation, as she used her TV broadcast platform to advocate for free speech, safe sex, gay rights, trans visibility, and sex-positive feminism through the darkest days of Reagan’s regime and beyond. When the documentary crew catches up with her in the 2020s, she’s long outgrown & outlasted her signature crocheted bikini and mostly just lounges around her Fire Island home with her longtime partner, waxing nostalgic about the good old days. She’s a pure joy to be around in either timeline, but the audience is especially grateful for every frame of vintage footage from her heyday on The Robin Byrd Show in particular, which itself was a weekly document of the bigger personalities from the NYC Porno Chic scene of the 1970s & 80s, as filtered through Byrd’s personal brand of low-fi psychedelic video art. It’s no surprise at all, then, that the self-described “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle eventually pops up in both of the timelines covered by the doc, appearing as a creative collaborator for Byrd in the 1980s and as a personal friend in the 2020s. Sprinkle’s own career saw her starting as a Porno Chic starlet on the NYC scene before she moved to San Francisco in the 1990s, where she made pornographic self-help tapes that doubled as psychotronic video art in the Robyn Byrd Show tradition (most notably among them, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop). Given their parallel career paths, a Robin Byrd retrospective documentary is just about the most likely place imaginable to find Annie Sprinkle besides maybe her own home. To find a proper recap of Sprinkle’s career in politicized porn production, however, you have to dig a little deeper than what you’ll find on the HBO Max splash page.
Annie Sprinkle was eager to reveal herself to her audience as early as her first directorial effort, the early-80s Porno Chic confessional Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. There, she breaks the rules of pre-video porno production by making direct eye contact with the camera and verbally addressing her audience, inviting them into her bedroom. Deep Inside is more a loose collection of Sprinkle’s sexual fantasies than a true self-portrait, though, acting as a catalog of her personal turn-ons rather than a true autobiography. It does open with Sprinkle flipping through a family photo album from her actual childhood, though, which is a lot more personal than most professional pornos tend to get. The closest thing Sprinkle has to a true Bang My Box-style career retrospective is the one-woman stage show Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real, which she filmed for the home video screen in 1999. Cinematically, Herstory of Porn borrows from the meta-critical Gen-X sarcasm of Talk Soup & MST3k, placing Sprinkle front row at her local porno theater so she can comment on a Greatest Hits clip show package of her own pornographic highlights in real time through the magic of greenscreen. As an autobiographical documentary, it’s occasionally informative, especially in the earliest stretch where Sprinkle reveals that she got into the porno business while working as a popcorn girl at a theater that was screening the Porno Chic landmark Deep Throat. When her theater’s print of Deep Throat was confiscated by the feds for an obscenity trial, Sprinkle was summoned to testify in court about its exhibition, which is where she met director Gerard Damiano, who dutifully helped initiate her into the biz. It’s difficult to take insightful anecdotes like that too seriously, though, since Sprinkle spends the majority of the runtime shoving toothbrushes & rolled-up American flags up her anus, narrating a “cumshot medley” from her classic works, and performing drag queen lip-syncs to footage of herself from various scenes of Deep Inside. Herstory of Porn is relatively informative about the general shape of Annie Sprinkle’s career, but it’s also an anarchic riot meant to shock & awe the jaded off-Broadway theatre types of 1990s NYC, which is a far cry from the softcore respectability of the Robin Byrd documentary.
Maybe the most revealing snippet of Herstory of Porn is Sprinkle’s assertion that sex is “simply the most interesting subject in the world,” musing to herself “why anyone would want to make a film or a video about anything else, I don’t understand it.” She really means it too. The deeper you dig into her 90s-era video productions the more you realize how all-important sex is to her, to the point where it’s just as much of a religious pursuit as a professional one. Her self-help video Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm (filmed in the 1990s, completed in the 2000s) continues the greenscreen psychedelia of the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop and the Herstory of Porn videos, with Sprinkle appearing onscreen in the pose of a local weather report girl to inform her audience about the spiritually transcendent power of the orgasm in all its many forms. She’s joined in her spatial void by a variety of experts on the subject: sex researchers, sex educators, sex therapists, cultural sexologists, regular sexologists, prostitution activists, chiropractors, poets, dominatrices, yoga instructors, and erotic touch experts. Each takes a turn describing a different facet of the human sexual orgasm in a standalone vignette: how to have one, how to fake one, what they feel like mixed with laughter, what they feel like mixed with pain, how they can occur during birth, how they can occur during death, how they can connect us to the world beyond observable life altogether. The Amazing World of Orgasm video is presented as an all-encompassing documentary on the health & spiritual benefits of sexual pleasure, but it looks & feels like a Dianetics or Unarius video — more New Age religion than quantifiable science. When it ends on the proclamation, “Happy orgasms to all!” it reads like a call to wands, inspiring its audience to change the world for the better by rubbing one out as soon as the tape concludes. It also consciously functions as an outsider-art curio, though, which is immediately apparent when the very first sexpert’s testimonial is illustrated by overlayed video-warp projections from both Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis and vintage porn from Sprinkle’s personal catalog. As sincere as Sprinkle is about the spiritual & political power about safe, pleasurable sex, she’s always careful to punctuate her rigorous research findings in that field with a sugary wink, signaling to her audience that it’s all in good fun.
As recounted in Herstory of Porn, Annie Sprinkle moved to San Francisco in the 1990s because she had earned a reputation for being too kinky for the professional pornographers of NYC. The cultish New Age hippie spirituality of California suits her well, and she’s since moved on from her “post-porn” self-help psychotronic phase to produce “eco-sexual” documentaries where she sensually fucks the planet Earth to promote Climate Change awareness (along with her wife and creative collaborator Beth Stephens). She’s also been incredibly smart about presenting & archiving her films in academic settings, where she can be primarily understood as an artist and a feminist instead of a pornographic actress, a designation that would undervalue her work in other contexts. I most frequently see her pop up as a talking head in documentaries on human sexuality these days, including the recent documentary on Fakir Musafar and the body modification movement, A Body to Live In. It may not surprise you to hear that Fakir also appears as a talking head in Sprinkle’s own Amazing World of Orgasm video, promoting body modification as a practical means for achieving religiously transcendent sexual climax. The only reason I know that is because Sprinkle maintains a subscription-based website where you can pay to access her archive of vintage “post-porn” self-help tapes online, including her must-see works: Amazing World of Orgasm, Herstory of Porn, and the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop. There’s a D.I.Y. ethos to her work in porn production & exhibition, refusing to wait around for institutions to fund, legitimize, or immortalize her art before it disappears forever. So, the most emotional I got while watching the new HBO doc Bang My Box was a scene where Robin Byrd reads a personal letter written by Sprinkle, urging her to have her personal VHS archive of The Robin Byrd Show scanned & preserved by an academic institution before that wealth of material is lost forever to time & decay. In that letter, Sprinkle stresses how important Byrd’s art is in both the realms of national politics and personal spirituality, and you can tell she means every word. Revisiting clips from that archive in Bang My Box, it became clear to me that The Robin Byrd Show was influential on Sprinkle’s signature “post-porn” video art style, and I was grateful that Sprinkle was retroactively influential on making sure that archive isn’t left to rot, unwatched.
Anytime the cult media distributor Vinegar Syndrome advertises an online sale, I immediately start perusing the offerings on their sister site Méluisne, where they’re also selling discounted Blu-rays of vintage pornography. Since most streaming services won’t touch hardcore titles of any quality, the only legal way to access most Golden Age pornos is to collect them on physical media, which makes Mélusine an irresistible siren during sales. That’s not to say that Vinegar Syndrome’s work restoring vintage horror schlock like Nightbeast,Demonwarp, Devil Fetus, orThe Suckling is any less important than their restoration of retro pornos, but there’s something about the physical-media-only exclusivity of Mélusine’s library that routinely has me reaching for my wallet. It’s highly plausible that I could catch up with an Italo horror relic like Burial Ground on Tubi one day, for instance, while the same can’t be said for the hardcore cuts of titles like SexWorld, Blonde Ambition,orPandora’s Mirror. So, during Vinegar Syndrome’s recent “Halfway to Black Friday” sale, I picked up a trio of Golden Age pornos to add to my personal schlock pile simply because they were discounted and looked interesting. As a group, the movies ultimately didn’t have much in common besides their shared X rating, their early-80s premiere dates, and their universal inclusion of a gentle lovemaking scene on the carpet in front of a fireplace. Individually, however, I found them taxonomically clarifying in the way they identify three distinct modes of traditional pornographic storytelling: the expected collection of standalone sex scenes that became an industry standard in the VHS era, the saga of absurd letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies you’ll find in stereotypically airheaded pornos, and the shockingly thoughtful & tragic dramas that are too much of a bummer for you to imagine anyone actually getting off to them despite all of the exposed & penetrated flesh.
1981’s Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was the directorial debut of its titular star, who makes direct eye contact with her audience while inviting us along to indulge her hottest sexual fantasies, one at a time. Sprinkle starts the picture pouring a glass of wine under the candelabra lighting of her living room piano, then shows the audience childhood photos from her life before the industry, when loved ones knew her as Ellen. After this photo album nostalgia trip, the camera pans over to a fireplace that’s been cropped just outside the frame, where two naked men are arm wrestling on the carpet as foreplay, waiting for Sprinkle to use their bodies. She quickly obliges, guiding the audience through her individual fantasies as she fucks new scene partners in every room of the house, narrating instructive demos for novelty sex acts like tit jobs, golden showers, and prostate play. The one-on-one intimacy of this non-narrative hangout would become much more common in the home video era that would soon snuff out the industry’s Porno Chic boom. In order to properly break the fourth wall, Sprinkle has to film herself instigating an orgy in the rows of a 42nd Street movie theater, exciting the audience with the fantasy that she might sit next to us at any time. It’s more an elaborately mediated act of mutual masturbation than it is a proper Golden Age porno, which has only become more standard and more direct in the modern era where performers can now interact with their audience in real time on video chat sites like OnlyFans. Sprinkle’s early prototype for that modern porno template—wherein narrative has been excised in favor of stringing together a collection of standalone sexual stunts—is still heavily scripted, though, and it includes such delightful cornball dialogue as, “Do you like big tits? Well, as you may have noticed, I have rather larger ones.” It’s just a nice, holesome hangout with our good friend Annie, who would later push its interactive format to much more psychedelic extremes in the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, an all-timer in pornographic video art.
You can tell Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was ahead of the curve in its audience-interactive intimacy by watching the bonus features for Neon Nights, which was also released in 1981. While providing commentary for a reel of unused outtakes, Neon Nights director Cecil Howard calls attention to the shots where Kandi Barbour makes direct eye contact with the camera during her own fireplace lovemaking scene, which had to be trimmed as a result. Neon Nights is much more traditionally narrative than Deep Inside, following the hitchhiking adventures of a horny runaway teen (Lysa Thatcher). That’s not to say Howard’s movie is better behaved than Sprinkle’s, though. It starts with Jamie Gillis fisting that teenage runaway’s mother while the teen listens intently from the opposite side of her bedroom wall, brushing her hair & practicing her makeup before using her beauty instruments as makeshift dildos. She decides to hit the road when her stepfather hits on her the next morning, in one of two scenes that reference the infamous shower stabbing sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho. The horrors continue on the road, where she encounters swinger magicians who make her levitate out of bed like Linda Blair, an unscrupulous nude photographer who likes to fuck on a bed of porcelain babydolls, and a dreamworld doppelganger for her creepy stepfather that she’s much more willing to sleep with. Neon Nights is one of the few movies where you’re grateful for a last-minute “It was all just a dream reveal,” since it recontextualizes a series of seemingly nonconsensual sex acts as the incoherent fantasies of a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants. More importantly, it’s an instructive look at the thin border that separated horror & pornographic filmmaking sensibilities in its era — two disreputable genres that were culturally dismissed for their shared cheapness & prurience. The runaway’s far-out sexual exploits are often set to the spooky theremin sounds of a sci-fi soundtrack. Veronica Hart’s sex scene among her babydoll collection is frequently punctuated by flashes of lightning to accentuate the taboo. Much like many dirt-cheap horror titles of its time, Neon Nights would make for an excellent classroom tool to demonstrate how simple lighting & color scheme choices (from the titular neon hues of a motel sign to the more porno-specific contrast of a pink-flushed face pressed against a lime green bedspread) can make even cheapest sets look fantastic … if it weren’t for all of the vigorous onscreen penetration that would alienate most students. It’s also just a very silly story about a teenage hitchhiker’s letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies, nakedly so.
When most modern audiences picture a narrative porno, they’ll think of outlandish fluff like Neon Nights, wherein a hitchhiker’s road trip storyline is used as a flimsy excuse to connect a series of standalone goofy sex scenes, even if artfully staged. There was a brief time, however, when Porno Chic features were thought to have a “crossover” commercial appeal and, thus, were expected to be populated by real characters with real emotional crises that could be resolved dramatically instead of pornographically. 1982’s Roommates (directed by Chuck Vincent) is the rare hardcore title that leers harder at women’s internal lives than their external ones, the kind of Golden Era porno that’s so dramatically heavy that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being turned on by it. Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart, and Kelly Nichols star a trio of young professionals sharing rent in a New York City apartment while struggling to break into the entertainment industry. Fox is eager to get into movie production work but is professionally haunted by her previous career as a callgirl; Hart is getting her feet wet as an off-Broadway stage actor but is caught between the affections of her seemingly gay costar and her older, married drama teacher; Nichols is a fashion model whose escalating drug addiction leaves her vulnerable to creeps & stalkers (most notably Jamie Gillis, again playing to type). All three women are on the verge of thriving, with only the universal problem of men being disgusting getting in the way of their success. As a result, most of the sex they have along the way is intentionally, uncomfortably bad — tainted by coercion, extortion, intoxication, and abuse. It’s the only professional porno I’ve ever seen where women immediately disengage from oral sex to spit in disgust, once in a toilet and another time onto the trousers of a reviled colleague. It’s also the only professional porno I’ve seen that convincingly stages actual, recognizably human arguments instead of bouts of belligerent shouting (give or take Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street). It’s as heavy on dialogue as it is short on sex, to the point where even its obligatory fireplace lovemaking scene is staged in front of the punier flame of several candles instead of the real deal. As a result, it’s the only title out of this trio that could be convincingly passed off as “a real movie” to most discerning audiences, which is a designation that’s often saved for pornos that are too dramatically upsetting to function as a genuine turn-on.
Obviously, the major cinematic draw of these vintage porno titles is the opportunity to see extreme images no other filmic genre would dare show onscreen. There is no shortage of those extreme moments in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, but I think I was most surprised by the infinite angles & configurations Sprinkle (along with uncredited co-director Joe Sarno) came up with to capture the action of Ron Jeremy’s hardon sliding between her “rather large” breasts. On the opposite end of the dramatic-pornographic spectrum, Roommates thought to include representation of cis women huffing poppers on a nightclub dancefloor, a salacious pastime that has become something of a trend among young partygoers in recent years but has obviously been in practice for decades. The real standout moment to me, however, is a scene from Neon Nights where actress Arcadia Lake is painting a giant cock on her home easel while actively masturbating between brushstrokes, which is just about as honest of a depiction of artistic process as I’ve ever seen in cinema. While cheap-o horror schlock and other disreputable genres have gradually been legitimized as worthy cultural artifacts, vintage porno is still a niche beat for professional critics & academics to cover, if it’s touched on at all. Since sexual fantasy is just as integral to human life and cinematic expression as any other natural impulse, it’s a shame that it has so little room for discussion or exhibition in the modern discourse, while half a century ago it was being covered by outlets like Variety and The New York Times. Even as someone who already values this kind of cultural runoff, I’m struggling to not make qualitative judgements about the naked titillation tactics of Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle or the daffy daydream fantasies of Neon Nights against the more somber downbeats of Roommates, which earns instant respectability by undercutting its own eroticism. I’ll need to watch more vintage pornography to work on that. In fact, all serious cinephiles should be watching more pornography of all varieties, the more outdated the better. There’s much left to interrogate & discuss, while most avenues of vintage horror discourse have already been exhausted well past their dead ends.
Last year, after watching The Blue Gardenia and being particularly taken with Ann Sothern in it, I looked her up and discovered that, over the course of eight years, she had starred in ten(!) films as a character named Maisie Ravier, a misadventuring showgirl. Those ten films are largely forgotten now, but I found all of them on Russia’s YouTube equivalent as uploaded VHS rips from Turner Classic Movies airings, and I dutifully archived them for this year with the intent of watching them all and writing about them for something I intended to call “Maisie May.”
Maisie May extended beyond the reach of the actual calendar month, but we still had a good time, didn’t we? In wrapping up these hours spent with Ann Sothern, I figured it would be best to do a ranking of the Maisie series, from worst to best. There’s virtually zero continuity within these films, so you can really pick up any of them at random. In a discussion that we had on a recent episode of the podcast, Brandon posited that these films would fit in easily as “programmers,” the kind of thing one would plug into an empty space in a screening event or programming block that could easily fit a broad theme. In that spirit, here comes Maisie, with recommendations for pairings.
Easily the worst of the bunch. Should not be programmed outside of an academic setting about casual racism in Hollywood history, alongside Birth of a Nation and Crash.
Below par. Sothern gets pushed to the side to make room for big name costar Red Skelton, who does a series of bits that are so awkwardly unfunny that time seems to stand still. Picks up once the intrigue of the plot starts to set in, but it’ll be far too late in the runtime for most to perk up about it.
Series: Red Skelton Red-trospective, as the finale following Merton of the Movies and Whistling in the Dark.
A decent but somewhat middling effort, an attempt to cash in on both the recent publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the John Ford film adaptation thereof, coming out the very same year as the latter. Some charming performances from child actors, and Maisie’s conflict with the grumpy ghost town dwellers is a nice treat. Nothing to write home about.
Series: The Dust Bowl, between The Grapes of Wrath, naturally, and Paper Moon.
Maisie finds herself employed as the companion of an elderly woman who doesn’t know that her son is making his money as a boxer. The story’s a little thin, but Maisie gets the opportunity to shine regardless, and it’s an unexpected twist that the decent girlfriend of the lead turns out to be a heel. Sothern has great chemistry with her real-life husband in what I believe is the only production they ever shared.
Series: Let’s Get Ready to Rrrrrrumble, as the second feature following Body and Soul and preceding Raging Bull.
The film in which we first meet our beloved heroine. The story beats in this nontraditional comic Western appear, retroactively, to be tired, but it’s only because the later films would lift bits: the unfaithful woman, the sudden appearance of an unexpected suicide (or an attempt thereof), Maisie settling down at the end with a man and a fortune, neither of which will ever be seen again. There’s a reason that there were so many sequels, though, and it’s because Ann Sothern really is just that charming.
Series: How the West Was Fun, sandwiched between City Slickers and Support Your Local Sheriff!
A fun little romp wherein we find Maisie in the employ of some mopey rich folks. She charms her way into everyone’s hearts, gives a father a dressing down for trying to fill the void he left in his children’s lives with money, and saves an ingenue from being taken advantage of by a philandering hanger-on. Good stuff.
In her final screen outing, Maisie joins the LAPD as an undercover officer with the division that investigates scams and con artists. She flunks her first mission but refuses to give up, resulting in her being taken captive by a trio of criminals and forcing her to use all her wits to break free. Suffers a little for being too much like Maisie Goes to Reno in some of its broader elements, and one of the weaker romance plots for this stronger back half of the series. Fun, but not the strongest way to end the series.
Series: Legendary Legal Ladies, sandwiched between Miss Congeniality and Yes, Madam!
Maisie, overworking herself in the war effort, develops a facial tic that causes her to wink at inopportune times, earning her a prescription for some time off. She decides to spend it in Reno working as an entertainer, but a promise to a young soldier leads her to stumble onto a plot to manipulate the soldier’s wife into a divorce, so that the new divorcee can be bled dry by her business partners. Maisie goes all out in trying to save a stranger’s marriage.
Maisie almost meets her match in conniving would-be actress Iris (Jean Rogers), while also documenting what women helping in the war effort did in their downtime and acting as a subliminal OSHA-esque reminder about protective equipment in the workplace.
Maisie finally gets involved in some real espionage! It’s corporate espionage, sure, but it still counts. Maisie’s love interest du jour is the inventor of a helicopter that can be operated as easily as a car, but one of the men on his crew is in collaboration to steal the prototype and fake its destruction. Maisie gets drugged at her engagement party and does a high dive in her clothes, and by the end of the film she’s flying the sweetest miniature of retro futurist helicopter that you ever saw like she was born for the skies. An utter delight.
Usually, when someone describes a movie as “torture porn,” they’re not being literal. The term is largely pejorative, wielded to shame & insult a crop of aughts-era horror thrillers that found pornographic satisfaction in torturing buxom young women under grimy fluorescent lights. The genre’s tone is decidedly unsexy, as it has been gradually understood as a subconscious expression of culture-wide discomfort with the US’s torturous interrogation tactics in the post-9/11 days of the War on Terror. It’s important, then, to distinguish 1994’s A Chinese Torture Chamber Story and its 1998 sequel as literal torture porn: overt attempts to titillate their audience through leering depictions of traditional Chinese torture techniques, repackaged into the sleek production values of 90s-era erotic thrillers. Unlike the accidental torture porn of the following decade, the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories are also very direct in their expression of horror with the governmental interrogation tactics of mainland China, voiced from the somewhat safe distance of British-ruled Hong Kong. So, while the cowardly Saw & Hostel hid their own queasy arousal with real-life torture victims of the American justice system under several layers of artificial, dramatic remove, A Chinese Torture Chamber I & II were bravely upfront about being simultaneously icked out & turned on by their own nation’s cruel & unusual tactics for beating “the truth” out of the accused.
The first Chinese Torture Chamber Story is structured like an especially crass episode of Law & Order, with a pair of accused adulterers standing trial under the duress of an arcane legal system. Before the 19th Century court, a poor chamber maid (Yvonne Yung) pleads for a panel of judges to believe that she did not sleep with her wealthy employer (Lawrence Ng) behind his wife’s back, nor did she conspire to kill her own husband (Tommy Wong) so that she could run away with said master in full adulterous sin. In flashbacks, we discover that she is telling the truth. In fact, she has been a victim all her life, from being effectively sold into sexual slavery as a potential concubine for her master, to being married off to a potentially violent husband as punishment for supposedly tempting said master, to being punished by a panel of judges for acts of adultery & murder she never actually committed. In the eyes of the law, however, she is guilty until proven innocent, so the audience is subjected to watching her get spanked, beaten, and lacerated in the present, between dramatic scenes proving her innocence in the past. This archaic interrogation might be interpreted as a political statement against the effectiveness of torture as a method of extracting a truthful confession out the accused, who mostly just wants the pain to stop, but in practice it’s played as an excuse to stage nonconsensual S&M acts for a disturbed, horny audience — starting with a bare-bottomed public spanking to set the tone.
What you might not gather from that plot recap is that A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a largely goofy slapstick comedy. The husband our poor handmaiden is married off to is introduced as another punishment for her supposed adultery, because he’s known to have a comically oversized penis that would physically harm any woman who attempts intercourse with him. When his timid bride finds him to be a tender soul and lovingly jacks him off from behind in a show of good will, the scene is played as a ZAZ-style parody of the pottery wheel scene from Ghost, complete with an Easternized remix of “Unchained Melody.” Her master also gets into over-the-top sexual mishaps while traveling away from home, most notably in a sequence where he meets a married pair of wuxia warriors, who perform violently athletic acts of wizard sex while flying through the treetops the same way most wuxia movies stage their sword fights. Any tonal seriousness elsewhere is a result of the extremity in the gore, which simulates historically accurate torture tactics involving chopped legs, pulled fingernails, crushed breasts, castration, and ritualistic penetration. Even those gross-out gore gags can be oddly humorous despite their heinous cruelty, though, never more so than in the opening credits sequence, which deploys the stock Wilhelm Scream sound effect a good dozen times before we even get to the title card. The movie wants you to squirm in discomfort, to squirm even harder in arousal, and to have a good laugh at its cartoon antics, all at the same time. It’s an all-timer cinematic feat in cognitive dissonance.
The 1998 sequel A Chinese Torture Chamber Story II falls much more solidly in-line with what an audience would expect from literal torture porn of this sort. Again, we are bearing witness to the ritualistic torture of a young woman accused of adultery & murder (Yolinda Yam), but in this case, she is guilty of the crime. In flashback, we learn the ways that her murder of an empire official (Mark Ho-nam Cheng)—whose entire job appears to be ritualistic torture of political dissidents—is morally justified. We meet her in a peasant village where her fiancée is hoping to earn enough money to one day make their marriage official, which opens the young couple up to a dangerous love triangle with a traveling warrior they find impressive in skill & social stature. The warrior’s potential to cuckold every small-town yokel who admires him is initially treated as a source of erotic intrigue, playing out like a mildly naughty Skinemax thriller with sweaty bouts of marital copulation relieving the tension. That hero worship quickly sours, however, when the noble warrior gets his puppy-dog devotees jobs in the local torture chamber, where they are horrified by the violent acts he emotionlessly performs as if he’s filing paperwork. Once his cold, villainous soul is revealed to the audience, he is free to commit horrific acts of sexual violence against his new employee’s wives, plunging the audience into a tonal ice bath that couldn’t differ further from the goofball boner comedy of the first movie in the series. We’re happy to see him killed.
The second Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a lot less playfully zany then the first one, which makes it difficult to recommend even to most schlock genre nerds. It’s strictly for freaks only. Still, it’s got such a psychologically fucked up villain that’s it proves to be a compelling watch in its own grimy way. At the very least, it’s the movie of the pair that more convincingly delivers on the “torture” qualifier of the “torture porn” designation, which is meaningful in a genre where the “porn” can never go past softcore. As exceedingly violent as Category III Hong Kong sex thrillers can be, their onscreen sexual activity is relatively tame compared to the hardcore pornos of America’s golden age. Characters will connect at the pelvis in sexual bliss, but there is no visible thrusting in that lower hemisphere; they can only heave their chests to simulate sexual motion. The screen can be overloaded with boobs & butts, but penises are only represented in veiled silhouette, except in nonsexual scenarios where they are separated from the body in elaborately violent acts of castration. The most onscreen sexual activity you’ll find in the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories is when the sex is at its most violence, as in when a comically gigantic penis literally explodes in a geyser of blood or when a character mimes forced fellatio on a magically invisible man. As literal torture porn, these movies are decidedly in bad taste, but they are also gorgeously staged acts of bad taste with surprising jolts of juvenile humor frequently interrupting their act of extreme sadism. The same cannot be said for American torture porn of the early aughts, which is just as dull tonally as it is visually & artistically.
Swampflix 